The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  ‘Where’s Garth?’ Gerald would say rather crossly: ‘Oh, I suppose those boys have got “The Daily”.’ He never talked down to children. Once he asked Max who was his favourite composer.

  ‘Schubert,’ said Max.

  ‘Oh, I thought it would have been Chopin,’ said Gerald, probably remembering his own childhood.

  In the late 1940s Daisy Fellowes and I were both worried about his health; he was obviously not well. She thought the one thing that would do him good would be to get him to her villa at Cap Martin. ‘We must get Gerald into espadrilles,’ she said. But he resolutely refused to cross the Channel; in any case he had never cared for the South of France, and he had not the energy to go to Rome. John Betjeman, one of his closest and dearest friends, and also a neighbour in Berkshire, said that after the war the world had so changed that Gerald never recovered his former joie de vivre. I myself do not think this is true. Despite rationing and petrol shortage, Faringdon became once more a centre of beauty, comfort, and amusement. We often went over, and we saw him with Daisy at Donnington. He brought his guests to dine with us. Robert, and Hugh Cruddas who was often there, cheered him with their high spirits, and friends came from London.

  Gerald sometimes brought Cyril Connolly to Crowood. He had been a benefactor during the war when he edited Horizon, a magazine financed by Hog Watson; he had now written a book, The Unquiet Grave, which, although it gave pleasure to many, earned him a good deal of unkindness from old friends like Evelyn Waugh, who thought it absurdly pretentious. Gerald always defended Cyril, saying: ‘To attack Cyril Connolly is like shooting a sitting robin.’

  As the years went by he used to come to us at Crowood for long visits. Daisy, or the Betjemans, lunched and dined, and he seemed to like a change of scene. I took him for carriage exercise in a tinny old motor along the Wiltshire lanes, or to Savernake Forest, and he was quite contented. Fortunately we had an excellent cook. I loved having him, and so did Kit. A man who interviewed me at the time of Gerald’s centenary celebrations said: ‘I can’t imagine Lord Berners and your husband together.’ This was the fruit of generations of journalists’ efforts to label people and put them in separate boxes marked ‘eccentric composer’, or ‘violent politician’, or whatever it might be. This man had met neither of them, but the truth is they were both brilliant and enjoyed each other’s company.

  Gradually, Gerald became less and less well. He had a bad heart, which tends to make one look on the dark side. We often spoke of his depressions; as I have said, he suffered from them on and off all his life. I urged him to remember that after a while there was light at the end of the tunnel; the depression lifted and went away. ‘It always happens,’ I said.

  ‘No it doesn’t. My mother had depressions and she died while she was having one,’ replied Gerald. He quoted Albert Chevalier, a music-hall star of his youth: ‘What’s the good of anythink? Why, nothink.’ Then he laughed, rather sadly.

  On the whole, considering his state of health, he was wonderfully cheerful. He did not care to be left too long, and once when he was staying with us I was obliged to go to London for the dentist. When I got back he wanted to know what I had done.

  ‘I lunched with Evelyn Waugh,’ I told him. ‘He says he prays for me every day.’ I suppose I sounded smug.

  Gerald was displeased. ‘God doesn’t pay any attention to Evelyn,’ he said.

  His eyes troubled him; the thought that he might soon be unable to read was a nightmare. He was not in pain, but he suffered from general malaise.

  In 1949 Kit and I got a boat and spent the summer in the Mediterranean; I wrote often and Gerald kept my letters:

  Alianora, 8 Sept 1949

  Darling Gerald

  I have just been in Rome for a few days, we left the boat at Civita Vecchia. It was boiling hot. I walked to the Forum from the Quirinale Hotel and stood for ages outside your house until I could see people were quite suspicious. I longed to ring the bell and see if Tito [The cook] would appear, but you know I can’t talk Italian so I was afraid we should just stand gazing at one another. The house looked lovely, the brass letter-box was shining and the wistaria was absolutely green, everything else in the Forum quite burnt and brown. I was in floods thinking of all the fun we had there, and Phyllis and the Veal Fiend [Both Phyllis de Janzé and Desmond Parsons had died] and everything… I do hope your poor eyes are still getting better.

  All fondest love, Diana

  Soon after our return to England he became too ill for visits to Crowood, but I went over to see him as often as I could. Robert and Hugh did all that was possible, but there were moments of great gloom, and during one of these Cecil Beaton happened to call at Faringdon. Gerald was full of complaints and said he was all alone, and ‘neglected’. Cecil put this in his diary, and then published it. I felt angry with him; it was so patently unfair, and the diary would be read by people who had no idea whatever of the circumstances, or the nature of Gerald’s illness. Recently I asked Daphne Fielding, a great friend of them all, ‘What would you say Robert and Hugh were to Gerald, when he was so ill at the end of his life?’

  ‘Pure gold,’ was her reply.

  He died in the spring of 1950. How happy he would be to know that Faringdon is as lovely as ever, the house full of flowers, the food as delicious, Robert a wonderful host, and the pigeons, or their descendants, still fluttering around dyed crimson or yellow or turquoise. Gerald’s dearest wish had been that Robert should live at Faringdon.

  Clever, talented, witty, original and private-spirited, he was the best companion as well as the most loyal friend anyone could be lucky enough to have.

  John Betjeman wrote: ‘Envious dry blankets who did not know him, and those who read of his luxury and the world of beauty with which he could afford to protect himself, may regard him as a relic of a civilized age. They can think what they like, the dreary form-fillers… They cannot be expected to understand the pleasure and thankfulness those people feel who had the privilege of his friendship.’ (The Listener, 11 May 1950).

  I evidently wrote to John Betjeman, whose words in The Listener seemed to me exactly right, for he replied:

  17 May 1950

  Dearest Diana,

  How nice of you to write to me about The Listener article about Gerald. I wish you w’d write a short thing to The Times—but I suppose it is too late now—pointing out what a wonderful friend he was. It was you who first drew my attention to this. I had so taken him for granted that I forgot how good a friend he was, and how scornful of all pretension and how loyal in trouble, effortlessly loyal it seemed. It’s hell without him, isn’t it…?

  It would be nice to see you. Telephone when you are at Crowood so that I may come over…

  These two original and delightful men, whose neighbours we had the good fortune to be, were as devoted to one another as I was to them both.

  Kit

  Sir Oswald Mosley

  The first time I met him was in 1932 at the twenty-first birthday party of a friend, Barbara Hutchinson, who afterwards married Victor Rothschild. We did not get on particularly well at that first meeting, but as he was out of Parliament and had plenty of free time, he and his wife Cynthia went about a good deal, as did my husband Bryan Guinness and I, and we saw one another frequently. He used to say he had seen me at a ball at Philip Sassoon’s house a few months before. I was twenty-one and he was thirty-five; he had resigned from the Labour government in 1930, and with a few other MPs had founded the New Party. When it was defeated at the General Election in 1931 he became a Fascist, and he was now writing a book, The Greater Britain, setting out his political and economic ideas. The word ‘Fascist’ in those days was not a term of abuse but described a system of government familiar to most people. Our hosts at this dinner party were Liberals, Philip Sassoon a Conservative Minister.

  Mosley had been asked to make a little birthday speech for Barbara, which he did. I knew of his reputation as a great orator and was rather disappointed by his performance; it suited
the occasion and was no more than friendly banter directed at Barbara’s father, St John Hutchinson, an old friend. Like everyone else, I also knew of his reputation as a lady killer, but this did not predispose me in his favour.

  A handsome, athletic-looking man, he was six foot two, well pro portioned, and dark with brown eyes; he looked healthy, strong, and very clever. He walked with a pronounced limp. As time went on, wherever we met he sought me out, we talked by the hour; he had a beautiful voice. Most of the time he talked and I listened, but when years later I asked him why he did not fall in love with me at sight, he replied: ‘I think it was because you were so opinionated.’ He never changed this view, and right at the end of his life he once said: ‘All our disputes are so intellectual.’ This was partly a joke and yet partly true, because in one respect, up to a point, I could have said of him what Proust’s Swann said of Odette, that he was not my genre. None of my other friends was the least bit like him; perhaps there never was anyone quite like him.

  Our increasingly close friendship did not endear him to my husband; we had many quarrels. I insisted upon my right to choose my own friends, and finally in November 1932 we decided to part company. Mosley had become indispensable to me, and I suppose I had become indispensable to him; at any rate he encouraged me in my decision to devote the rest of my life to him, and this I did. I think it would be true to say that everyone, without exception, was furious about it.

  The only disapproval I really minded was my brother’s. Mosley was never called Oswald, from birth he had been Tom, an impossible name from my point of view because of my brother. Tom Mitford and I were near in age and we loved each other dearly. When we were children he was closer to me than my sisters; after he went to school we spent the holidays together, reading the same books, listening to the same music, even riding together, though he never cared for horses and hunting as the rest of us did. He was clever, and a gifted musician. We had an excellent library inherited and added to by my grandfather; it was a little way from the house in a large room with a grand piano and sofas. Tom played the piano for hours on end, I read, and listened. His friends who came to stay in the holidays became my friends, the library was our private paradise where we were never disturbed.

  When I parted from my first husband, Tom strongly disapproved and we had the nearest thing to a quarrel that ever marred our relationship. He was fond of Bryan; he also thought that for a temporary infatuation I was ruining my life and that I should bitterly regret it. As the years went by he revised his opinion, but at the beginning every one of my friends and relations deplored my decision, some in sorrow but most, like my parents, in impatient anger. It was a normal reaction which I understood perfectly well. I was only twenty-two; although I was convinced of the permanency of what I had decided to do, other people gave it a year at most.

  I had to think of a name for Mosley and called him Kit—why, I have completely forgotten, but so he was known by my Guinness sons, and all young people, and our French friends. Those who called him Tom became old and the name died a natural death. By his political colleagues he was known as O.M. His name for me was Percher (pronounced Persia). Once, in France, he said, ‘Look at that horse with a yellow mane, just like yours!’ I told him it was a Percheron, and the name stuck.

  His New Party, as I have said, had failed in the election of 1931, when a huge Tory majority calling itself a National Government had been elected to pick up the pieces left by Labour, which had the misfortune to be in office when the financial world collapsed between 1929 and 1931. Extreme measures seemed to be required to meet a situation of exceptional gravity.

  Mosley’s career hitherto must briefly be described. He came from a long line of landed gentry in the North and Midlands. The Mosleys were fairly rich; Manchester was built on land they owned, though they failed to profit greatly from this. They settled in Staffordshire at Rolleston-on-Dove, where in Jacobean times they built a house. They supported the Royalists in the Civil War. In the eighteenth century, what must have been a delightful Palladian house was built round the ancient hall, but a hundred years later a disastrous fire completely destroyed it together with almost all the family pictures and furniture. The plate, molten in the furnace, was to be seen streaming out of the strong room. A large Italianate mansion was built onto the shell of the old house in the 1870’s. After the First World War it seemed too big and it was sold to a speculator and demolished, the park cut up and dotted with villas.

  Rolleston Hall was fairly ugly without and hideous within, but Kit loved the place and said that but for the great fire, long before he was born, he would never have left, and his life might have taken a different course. All that remains is the Spread Eagle Inn, with the Mosley family crest for its signboard, in Rolleston village.

  His mother, Maud Heathcote, came from a similar family in Shrop shire. She and his father parted, but with her three sons she spent a great deal of time staying with old Sir Oswald Mosley at Rolleston, hunting with the Meynell. Kit and his brothers were typical of their class and time, hating school, loving sport, and knowing Surtees by heart.

  ‘Here’s to the hounds of the Meynell. The world cannot boast such a kennel,’ said Kit. Both grandfathers were devoted to him.

  Like so many eldest sons in similar families, he was destined for the army. When in 1914 the War began he was a Sandhurst cadet of seventeen. He immediately joined his regiment, the 16th Lancers, but as it was stationed at the Curragh in Ireland rather than in France, he got permission to join the Flying Corps, was sent to France, and was flying over the German lines as an observer before he was eighteen. He went to Shoreham to train as a pilot and had just got his wings and was flying solo when the wind changed, but owing to negligence on the ground the wind signal had not been changed so that when he landed he crashed and broke his leg badly. His regiment, which by now had suffered heavy losses of young officers, recalled him to France before the leg had completely healed; in the flooded trenches as time went on it swelled so that he could not get his boot on and was obliged to crawl or hop. This was discovered, and he was sent back to England where he had two operations. Surgeons saved his leg, but it was two inches shorter than the other one and for the rest of his life he wore a surgical shoe, built up to match the sound leg. He was then put on light duty and at the end of the war was sent to work in the Foreign Office.

  During his long spell in hospital he had read enormously, and in fact educated himself. He had no wish to go to a university; after his war experiences it seemed too much like going back to school. Neither Lloyd George nor Churchill had been to a university; it was not a prerequisite for politics, and it was to politics that his mind now turned. The appalling disasters and suffering of the war seemed to him the result of political failure within Europe.

  At this time, when he had leave he stayed with friends in country houses and made the acquaintance of prominent politicians. It was F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, who, recognizing the potential of the young man, said to him: ‘If we were Frenchmen or Germans we should go into the army. But in England it must be politics.’

  Mosley was adopted as Conservative candidate at Harrow and elected in the khaki election of 1918, soon after his twenty-second birthday. He made his mark in the House of Commons almost at once as a brilliant speaker and witty debater. The facility and felicity with which he found the right word was as impressive to his listeners as the fact that he could keep seemingly inexhaustible supplies of figures and statistics in mind, available when required. Neither in Parliament nor on the platform did he use notes.

  As a boy his greatest pleasure had been hunting, and with his leg in irons he had hunted in Leicestershire when he was on leave at the end of the war, but now he sold his horses in order to devote himself entirely to politics, and embarked upon his arduous, life-long struggle. He, who was so gifted for the enjoyment of everything that makes life delightful for a healthy, handsome young man, often said: ‘I must have been mad. Why could I not be content with my good fortune, bei
ng born to enjoy everything so much more than most people seem able to do?’ Why had he spent his life attempting the impossible, first to prevent the decline of industrial Britain and solve the problem of mass unemployment and the semi-starvation of millions of people, and then to stop a second world war which ruined our continent and reduced our country to a shadow of its former greatness? The answer is that he was convinced he could see what must be done, and that with his brilliant gifts and dynamism he thought there was a chance he might succeed.

  When after experience in the ranks of the selfish and lazy post-war coalition in Parliament he crossed the floor of the House and joined Labour, he was sent round the country to speak at countless meetings. In the course of his journeys he had been infuriated by the disgusting housing conditions which prevailed nearly everywhere, but particularly in the North. The best description of what life was like for the unemployed, and for those with work, in the industrial North is George Orwell’s notes for The Road to Wigan Pier. He came in for a good deal of criticism as a rich socialist, but that was to confound socialism with Christianity. A rich Christian must sell all he has and give it to the poor; a rich socialist on the other hand aspires to abolish poverty. When he joined the Labour Party there was a Move to expel him from White’s, but it was squashed by his friend Ivan Moore-Brabazon (1st Lord Brabazon of Tara). Subsequently, throughout his unorthodox career, prison and so forth, he always remained a member. He never cared much for clubs, preferring solitude or the company of women. If he had a couple of hours to spare, he went to the Salle d’Armes and fenced with foil or épée. Sometimes he took me; he fenced with skill, and the will to win indispensable to success in any game. His whole character was in evidence when he was fencing; the ‘happy warrior’.

  Labour won the 1929 election and Ramsay MacDonald gave Mosley the task of curing unemployment. He was confident he could do it, and it was subsequently realized and admitted that his programme would have been successful. His plans to find work for the unemployed included vast housing schemes and the creation of a modern infrastructure. Roads in those days were ‘like goat tracks’ he used to say. We now have roads, but more than half a century later Britain is still disfigured by slums, or sub-standard housing as it is now called.